Big Digital Energy

0:00 We're back. We, we took a break last week. We had a hiatus or back, except for Kurt. So does my voice sound different? You know, I had nasal surgery last week. And so, by the way, 27 tampons

0:16 shoved up each nostril is not fun, but was not as painful as I thought. But I was really worried that my podcasting career was over because my voice had changed. I'm glad it says I sound different.

0:29 I said I said over here for a reason. You know, we had that back and forth about

0:35 Collins reach. And he reminded us of his eight factor. There we go. So I said over here in Kirk's Colin would be in his normal spot, but yeah, okay. And then I moved over here by you. I'll

0:48 watch my music use as I said it. He makes plays exactly. You've already got one side of your lip, bruise there. We don't need to get to the other side. That's a pending Darwin Award submission.

0:60 And yes, it was. So, did we get video of it? Well, I have to see if I can recover it off the

1:10 phone that was essentially destroyed, but still operating I just can't, I have to temporarily replace the screen to see if that video is captured. And it sounds like it's a violent thing. Sounds

1:20 like it's a violent thing. Oh, it'll never see the light today. The audio will probably be even better. All right, let's roll into energy news 'cause we've been out of it for two weeks. So,

1:31 acquired diamond offshore this morning for 16 billion. Oh, that happened this morning. I didn't see that. Happened this morning. Passion stock. I think 11 in change premium percent premium over

1:44 Friday's close. They get no, we'll get essentially the centerpiece assets or their seven seventh gen drill ships and we've got some other assets that they noted. But if

2:00 your customers are going to consolidate, I, I guess it, it makes sense, 100 million in synergies in the first years is what was, what was in their release and nobles release that I saw, I didn't,

2:13 I wasn't aware of it until you mentioned it earlier.

2:17 This is the first MA and off-road drillers in a while.

2:22 It's been, there was some in like 2000, I think, 16, 17 timeframe, but it's been kind of quiet since then, unless I'm missing any. But that's pretty, it's a pretty big deal. I'm looking at it

2:37 right now I'm just gonna get an idea of this happening. Circa, let's call it

2:44 98, 99. I put together a big pitchbook that said there should be only one offshore EP company, at least on the shelf. And then there should only be one offshore service provider. And I wrote up

3:04 these big diagrams about how everybody could contribute all their assets to this and what share they would get and I ran around to the industry and pitched to everybody and everybody said, That

3:14 sounds great. I'm willing to run it into my share needs to be twice as big. So I got that at every stop. I wonder if - Then Chuck, you were the Consolidator Maxi. Yeah, I was Consolidator Maxi

3:28 back. I wonder if this was actually the opposite if those guys were sitting there. No, you run it. No, you run it. I don't want to be around anymore. That's a noble acquired Pacific drilling

3:38 and 2021. I think that was probably the last one that - Less meaningful and young. Yeah, that are, I remember. So, Nobles kind of becoming the giant there, swallowing everyone up. So, who do

3:52 we have left? We got Noble, Transo, Transo, Transo, Transo, Transo, Sea

4:00 Drill. What else is out there?

4:04 Maybe if - I was never an offshore guy. Drill ships, but yeah. Diamond's office is right over here, off of I-10, right before our office. I wonder if they keep that or - Where's Noble? We're

4:19 looking for space. Yeah, we'll take that, we'll take what's - We'll take their space. Is that - Is that us? Come inside with the digital odd caters IPO on the Texas exchange. Yeah, you know, I

4:32 think they said first companies listed are gonna be in 2026, so that gives me two years of - runway to build up until then. Then they raise, what did they raise? I don't mind. I don't mind. I

4:43 don't mind. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't get to talk about that last week, but Texas stock has changed back by, I think it was Citadel and BlackRock. It's all right. Did you see? Let me look real

4:56 quick. Let's see, Texas stock exchange. I'm pretty sure that's right, but I don't wanna, I don't wanna. I would think exchanges would be a thing of a past I think, well, let's talk about that

5:10 a little bit, 'cause like regional exchange, like. Well, we used to have regional exchanges and they all kind of just wound up under the NASDAQ, you know? Yeah, like why, you know, what's the

5:21 purpose? But everyone knows what the purpose of this one is. It's for anti-ESG. So,

5:30 you know, will this be the market where you can get away with not having some of the bullshit ESG standards that guns our call. Yeah, you know, I was on the, I was on the barbecue barbecue. I

5:43 was on this email thread

5:46 with these really rich oil and gas guys, some of them billionaires, and they were talking before I got put on the thread, and they were talking about wanting to create a Texas Wall Street that was

5:59 based in anti ESG. And so that's back in like 2020. Um, so this, this talk's been happening for. It's going to be interesting to see how the, the national exchanges, politics

6:16 around this

6:20 eminent launch, I guess, did you say 2026? Yeah. Hold on. I'm trying to, I can never find anything when I want it. Uh,

6:32 I'm looking here, let's see if perplexity will help me out.

6:36 Yeah, it was BlackRock and Citadel that put up that100 million, 120 million

6:43 in initial funding.

6:48 We have actually got to be a commissioner. Maybe so. I'll be commissioner, change. I don't know. You're a private guy though, that's true. I don't know who the guys are behind it who's

7:01 launching and putting it together, but I mean, having BlackRock and Citadel putting up the money for it, signals something. 180 degrees from where BlackRock was at, beginning of the. Who we got?

7:14 Remember we have that BD episode where I'm bashing on, Larry Fink. Yeah, exactly. For pushing. Although, how base can it actually be that if they're gonna headquarter it in Dallas? I mean, I

7:26 guess it could be worse if it was in Austin, but it's how it were they're headquartering. Yeah. It says the Dallas Cowboys fan. Yeah, that's true That's true. Yeah. needs to be in Houston, in

7:37 my opinion. But that's either here nor there. So yeah, 2026 is when they'll start listing, I think they get licensed in 2025. So sounds like that'll happen pretty quick. It's gonna be fun. What

7:52 they were talking about in the news articles was that talking about all the companies that are headquartered in

8:00 Texas and they named all these big companies But is that actually relevant to the Texas stock exchange like what a, there's a big company that's headquartered here.

8:16 Exxon. Going blank, yeah, Exxon. The biggest. But Exxon lists on the Texas stock exchange over the New York stock exchange. Like what's the benefit to moving over? Yeah, they need to have

8:28 something in the business plan 'cause it doesn't feel like trading securities.

8:35 Now that you say, here's the deal, trading stocks, it's not a lot of money in that. And Mark, you should take over this conversation whenever you want, 'cause I know we've done it. But, so the

8:47 margins on trading stocks, pretty slim, where the exchanges are making all their money is on the backend data. Who owns what, who's trading what, and they sell that. So like Nasdaq packages that

9:01 up and sells it to you. Hey, you wanna know who's buying your stock, win all that sort of stuff. So, you know, potentially that's what this is, is can we get companies lifted over here and

9:13 we're gonna wind up with a good day. Well, with energy over the last several years going from a peak of around 13, 14 of the SP to a trough of under 3. Don't know where it is exactly now,

9:25 probably just under 5 and

9:28 the contraction that that implies in terms of trading stocks and the price pressure. It's a pretty skinny business skinnier today than it's ever been. Yeah. In terms of per share commissions, I

9:42 know some firms have actually shut down specialist trading operations or outsourcing those things because the margins on those businesses have continued to come under pressure over the last decade

9:55 plus I think it has a lot to do with the fact that

10:00 you just have much more efficient mediums of trading your own book, which

10:07 we did when I was on the buy side for a while, we always looked at

10:13 our trading costs and did a lot of our own trading through a lot of these online platforms, even on the institutional side. There are other ways to get paid in the energy securities business, but

10:27 trading commissions have continued to shrink just in terms of both price and volume. I mean, I guess there could be a story of let's create an exchange for smaller companies, make it more price

10:39 competitive because it's a lot of money to be able to list on NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange. The

10:51 one thing you do know is the fidelities and all these big institutions have way more money than they have opportunities. That's why we saw all those back deals done

11:03 like we're done and so maybe that's part of the story. I wonder if we can find a CEO or who I was leaving to charge. I'll get someone to come on the show and talk about it for sure. All right, so

11:17 from Texas, should we go to India?

11:21 Sure. We finally had the India elections done. They started April 19th. They've

11:30 In early June, there were seven different phases. And this was the election for the house of the people, the lower house of the Indian government. They're 543 members. I'm going to try this so

11:43 anyone correct me. Lock Saba, is that the lower house? Sounds good. Anyway, the way those elections work is in effect, you're running for office. First pass the, first pass the post. So

11:58 whoever gets the most bid wins If you get four, I get three, you get two, you won with four. And what happened is the existing prime minister, Modi kind of

12:10 got his butt kicked. I mean, he had a, he had a, with his BJP party and an absolute majority from the vote last time. This time he lost 63 seats. So he's got 240 out of 543 with his coalition

12:28 partners still has a majority but it's pretty slim. And this was kind of in the face of, he's gonna kick butt and maybe even add to his majority, which proved wrong. So kind of the last thing I'll

12:42 say on it, the big issues seem to be unemployment of young people. 'Cause they're at a 45 year high on unemployment. College graduates, 42 of them are unemployed The youth unemployment in general

12:60 is like 22, kind of compared with 7 overall. So that seemed to be kind of the big beef. Yeah, it contrasts with what we saw in the EU election, which we'll talk about here in a minute. You had

13:14 the center left in India, despite really loud predictions of a landslide. In fact, there was a belief or fear that BJP was going to actually win 400 seats this time around after winning. 303 in

13:32 2019, so 400 was believed to be in reach, and there were a lot of predictions of a BJP landslide, which did not occur. In fact, exit polling in this latest round, the seventh phase was

13:45 suggesting that that landslide was going to come to pass, and it didn't. So I think above all this proves the resilience of the India democratic system, and sometimes the reliability or

14:02 unreliability of polling, which obviously we've seen here in recent and past elections in the US. It was crazy. I was just talking to a friend about that, with statistics in polling. I was like,

14:14 it's crazy how wrong polling is. With technology today, you've never been so able to avoid polling, if you want. And so there's more selection bias in

14:28 samples and ever. This is crazy. There were almost a billion people registered to vote. About two thirds of those people voted. So you had north of 600 million people vote. Half the people that

14:41 voted were women. So you had 300 some odd million women vote. And that almost the population of the United States. Yeah, population of the United States. Those are the size of women voting.

14:53 That's the same. So the minority party's fear of this landslide is that there would be an increase in Hindu nationalism, which Modi has been characterized as being

15:08 somewhat of a, what do they call it, a unipolar type of approach. And so this, I think, tempers that fear, I didn't realize the unemployment

15:24 issue That was, that you just mentioned Chuck.

15:30 It's going to be interesting to see because as we've talked about in the recent past, India's got this balancing act between being part of the coalition of governments and countries that are pushing

15:46 more toward, like the EU pushing more toward energy transition and at zero, but we've also seen from the Indians a pretty redoubled effort to increase coal production and coal-fired generation,

16:02 which up till now has constituted roughly 23 to 70 percent of India's power generation, which has an uptime, I believe, somewhere in the 50 to 60 percent range And also,

16:17 I think Modi

16:21 has been giving off signals that India wants to join the IEA, which then puts them within that. set of rules and guidelines. So politically, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out

16:32 because BJP has been an India first.

16:37 That's central to the platform of BJP. What's the benefit of joining the IEA? Especially when your country's at 50 uptime.

16:47 Like I'd be looking at how I increase my uptime. That's the conundrum, right? Is that in reality,

16:57 what we've seen, where people have suffered

17:03 both in terms of cost and reliability, an overly aggressive push to renewable sources, which are inherently more intermittent problematic from that standpoint. We'll see how that balancing act and

17:18 trade-off is handled by the BJP going forward 'Cause I think we're at a bit of a crossroads, at least politically, where do they go? And if I were. betting on it, then I think we're gonna see

17:31 ultimately that it's not gonna be tenable for India to join the IAA.

17:39 Optically, maybe it makes sense, but practically on the ground, it's not going to make sense. Well, they've always been, you know, the line from India has always been, yeah, we're happy to

17:48 talk in missions. Her person, you know, anytime you in the West wanna deal with that The thing I feel find interesting is you read about this election and they talk about, well, this hamper,

18:03 India's continued economic growth because he has less power. And I always find it interesting in the United States, our periods of greatest economic growth are when we have divided government and

18:15 the rules aren't changing. So it'll be interesting to watch that. The one thing I've read, Mark and I were talking about this a little earlier And this was almost kind of offhand in the article I

18:26 was reading. There might be something in the way of environmentalist type stuff in terms of a push for more renewables, et cetera. They get bandied about, 'cause when you have divided government

18:39 and you're trying to build a coalition to vote for something, you're making trade-offs. So you're defined environmentalist type,

18:51 type votes can be bought with one thing, more renewables. And so that may get thrown into stuff, but again, it was kind of a murky, sorta, this may happen type thing. Yeah, I mean, I haven't

19:02 been in Delhi in over 20 years, but

19:09 I remember my first time walking out of the hotel at 930 in the morning and it looked like nighttime. The small cover was so heavy, I've never seen anything like it. It is a real pollution issue.

19:19 Yeah, air quality. But what do you do with India's grid if you're gonna transition away from coal

19:27 of stating the obvious, it's very difficult. And the cost issue, I think, continues to weigh pretty heavily. So I just think with the center stage, COP,

19:44 and this stated desire, perhaps, to join the IAA and this less-than-land slide election victory, these terms are five years, the next five years of Modi's leadership are gonna be very interesting

19:59 from a energy politics standpoint. Is it India first, or is it more balanced, relative to the other member countries of the IAA?

20:10 I looked at research,

20:13 what are the major issues for smog and air pollution in India? It's curious, is it all from coal, or what is it? And first one was vehicle emissions. So rapidly growing population with many older

20:26 vehicles running on diesel and emitting high levels of particulate matter and other pollutants, second one, industrial emissions from industries, particularly thermal power plants, burning coal,

20:38 crop residue, burning farmers and states like say they burn rice stubble after the harvest releasing huge amounts of particulates. That's interesting. Wow, mouse Well, here's, if you go down the

20:52 list, number five is residential biomass burning. The burning of solid fuels like firewood, cow-dung cakes, cow-dung cakes. And as we talked about in the UK with Drax

21:12 and their conversion of coal-fired generation facilities would pellets, would pellets, although not accounted for or emit more, than coal from bird to seal of power or whatever met from a sea of

21:17 two-step So

21:20 yeah, so you look at that and it's like, okay. I mean, one problem is that they just have a shit ton of people, right? And growing vehicle population and probably use a ton of, you know.

21:33 'Cause I mean, if you do. Four cycle motorbikes over there that are terrible. I mean, if you're an 18 year old kid and you get to bar your dad's car and take the head cheerleader out on the date,

21:43 man, you can do everything in your power to have a car for the rest of your life. Yeah. You know, so

21:49 that's not just an American phenomenon Yeah,

21:55 you know, even like one on our team, down in Guadalajara, like he's excited 'cause he's gonna get to buy a car soon. He's like, now I'm gonna go to the side of town to train Jiu Jitsu, but I

22:06 haven't a car which prevented him from being able to do that. And so, but I think the residential biomass burning is interesting because you look at it All right, you look at it.

22:22 the whole movement in the United States against natural gas being piped into homes and the respiratory issues, it causes and all this shit. Well, usually it comes down to poor ventilation and not a

22:32 large enough space if we're being completely honest. But I saw this video, I believe it was from the IEA and I posted on Twitter several weeks back and it was of a woman in a village in Africa. And

22:45 she talks about how she spends most of her day collecting firewood to cook on So she wakes up in the morning, walks out, likes firewood, comes and cooks, goes back out, collects more firewood for

22:57 dinner, spends most of her day collecting firewood and cooking. And then they cook inside their house with this, with this wooden fire and so her and all of her children have respiratory issues.

23:09 Yeah, women and children who are disproportionately exposed to that poorly ventilated space while the burning is going on and have disproportionately

23:20 Health issues. She made a comment verbatim about how much nice her life would be for them if they had natural gas. She didn't say so. But you basically double your life expectancy when you start,

23:30 stop burning dung inside your house for heat and cooking. Yeah. So anyways, that's, you always have this, you have this argument from people on Twitter. It's like, oh well, if they're, if

23:43 they're gonna switch, you're gonna switch to lower cost energy sources, which is wind and solar.

23:51 It's like, okay, well, if that's the case and they will, they will switch to the lowest, lowest cost source, but this whole heating and cooking issue, yeah, sure, you can make a case that any

24:07 electrified appliances, and those are powered by solar, but it just seems very logical that, I guess, and propane displace that. Take away from it. Propane and propane accessories. I saw

24:21 propane and propane accessories. Thank you. Well, onto more election news and maybe even better election news. EU, the Greens got shocked. Bam. Yeah, just a couple of anecdotes. The Greens

24:37 did not lose their majority in the EU parliament but it is weaker

24:46 Some of the immediate reactions one I found most amusing is that French president, Macron immediately dissolved parliament after a crushing loss to Marine Le Pen's far right party and the social

24:58 democrats in Germany Olaf Scholz's party suffered their worst defeat at the hands of the Christian democrats in more than a century.

25:09 So,

25:11 this type of

25:13 maybe quasi gridlock is the way think about it. We don't have that.

25:19 just steamrolling majority that existed for the last however many years in the new parliament, there's going to be a lot more friction related to net zero by 2050 policies and all the related

25:35 programs and ultimately cost that a

25:43 European citizenry across several key countries that are clamoring and there was a lot of ringing of hands over the populist voice being more heard in this election than ever before. Well, it's a

25:58 function of what they've been on a daily basis, been living through for the last several years, most notably during the recent energy crisis. So I look forward to being back in Europe here in a

26:12 couple of weeks and seeing some different perspective on the ground.

26:19 I saw this post from Elon Musk on Twitter. I'm just going to Twitter as Mark's talking. Said, If we all work together, we can reach Uranus.

26:29 I did.

26:32 So let's keep it with.

26:37 Let's keep it with, we'll hit the IEA real quick credit to Sean Maher, our friend who's now the chief economist at Phillips 66 commented on the IEA's report on clean energy spending versus fossil

26:50 fuel spending in 2024, almost2 for every dollar spent on fossil fuels and quote unquote clean energy as the IEA characterizes it. Of that, 2 trillion, 500 billion is in a solar PV category which

27:11 is more than slightly over400 million and all other generation categories combined.

27:26 You said there's two trillion in CapEx? Three trillion total, two trillion in clean energy. Oh, okay. One trillion or so in fossil fuels. And I read a bit of the highlights of that on the IEA's

27:33 report. We'll post the link to that. One of the first subtext or headlines is that

27:43 there's a lamenting of the fact that emerging market and developing countries only account for 15 of the clean energy spending. And somewhat absent, at least in what I read, is what we always talk

27:58 about. What about, you know, transmission in the grid. And I thought about, you know, some recent pieces that I've read about this accelerated build out of solar and wind in the US, you know,

28:11 it's showing up in the rate base see, but shorter, live, new. capital assets in the rate base and the utilities are guaranteed a return. So you've got a bigger, a larger number asset base. And

28:28 so that inherently translates into, into higher power costs. So if we're going to accelerate this, what does that mean in terms of how those costs are born or do the rules change ultimately, where

28:41 we have a different more competitive way, because the incentive to accelerate spending adds high depreciation assets, new assets, plus, if you look at

28:56 the life cycle of what's replacing, ostensibly replacing on the generation side, base load, which it's really not, unless we get grid scale, battery storage across the board, what does that mean

29:11 for

29:14 these states and and for the PUCs that are having to make these decisions on what type of generation to add and how fast. I saw something last week. I don't remember the source that there's a

29:30 resurgence in a build out of gas fire generation in Texas, which I think has a lot of connection to. We've got it, we've put it together. It just paid a power demand for data centers, et cetera,

29:42 so. Yes, all that And that was the last week's podcast that I dropped ahead of AI, former head of data centers, friends, how on. And the thing that I keep harping on on all this stuff is, I

29:59 just don't think the existing utility players are going to supply the future electricity we're going to need. I mean, they're just monopolies, monopolistic mindset To your point, we start sticking

30:12 in, renewables, and things that lead to higher rates and having to build transmission. And that's just really, really complicated and gotten us as far. So kudos to them. I don't think they're

30:26 gonna do it. Going forward, I think you're gonna start for these data centers, making decisions for your data center. How am I gonna power this? And tech is all just focused on nukes and energy

30:42 guys go, Well, there's a lot of regulatory stuff you gotta go through to do nukes. And I go, Not if you're a tech company. If you're an energy company, yeah, they hate us. I was talking to

30:53 Founders Fund last week. And guy was like, Man, I'm super bullish on energy demand. He's like specifically, I guess, power up data centers. So now, what that said, Founders Fund is not liar.

31:05 And the way they think from Silicon Valley. Well, and I hope so. I thought that was cool as shit to hear from him. He didn't bring up nukes. I mean, he went straight to that gas. Yeah, 'cause

31:11 my thing to

31:15 all the natty companies that have been tweeting it out, I gave a speech about it as like, start calling on big tech. You know, your head, be the crack dealer, give away the crack. I mean, this

31:27 has always been the way that's going as co-location. Well, we did have the energy secretary recently at Vogel, Vogel, Vogel commissioning or ribbon cutting Let's say we're gonna

31:42 embark upon a massive build-out of nukes, but as we talked about with Bob Coons a few weeks ago, something's got to change in terms of the crushing regulatory burden and costs that are foisted upon

31:58 nuclear developers, both large and small. And that takes a lot of time. And if you look back to that graph of the build out of nuclear by country. The US has a big hockey stick in the late '70s,

32:14 early '80s. The French have proven pretty adept at building grid-scale nuclear generation and doing it very cost-effectively. I think what changes, though, is this talk talks about a lot. Silicon

32:30 Valley has a lot of political clout, so you have that going. But then, too, with these small modular reactors, it sounds like there's a lot less regulatory And plus, they collaborate. So, I

32:42 mean, Google and Microsoft and Amazon all get together and say, hey, let's choose one design for these reactors. We need it about this side, boom, boom, boom, and put their might behind it and

32:54 go. And that's where the political leverage in changing the whole regulatory overburden and framework is going to be driven. It seems pretty cool. I just recorded a podcast with Mike Umberle last

33:07 week on oil and gas startups doesn't release yet, but once it releases everyone should go listen to it because it's really good. We talked all about geothermal energy storage and what his whole play

33:17 is, but I look at

33:20 essentially what Mike and his guys are doing is they get these massive cylinder solar arrays and they capture thermal heat from the sun and then

33:38 they generate steam and then they pump that down whole and they heat up the reservoir. And so it's kind of like artificial geothermal, super fucking cool stuff. And then there's another startup

33:51 that just got funded by Sam Altman and some other investors and it's a built-for-purpose data center,

33:59 energy technology. Essentially, they have these big shipping containers where your data centers are in, and then they have these solar panels, but they're not using solar panels for power

34:10 generation. They're capturing the heat, and then they use that heat to power a steam turbine, and then they've got batteries. So it provides this 247 base load power that's right there on the

34:28 containers themselves And so this whole idea of using solar as a heat source to power engines is pretty cool. So you're starting to see some things like that that are kind of purpose built for data

34:43 centers, but it doesn't matter if it's nuclear, if it's solar thermal heat, if it's net gas, you're gonna need it all. And it's gonna be co-located, and this isn't just with data centers. This

34:54 is gonna be big manufacturing operations like manufacturing facilities. probably a ton of power themselves. And I think you'll start seeing them being closer located to their primary energy source.

35:10 And my whole point is, is you the producer of natural gas, recognize who your ultimate customer is and go straight to - Straight to him. Yeah, yeah. Like how do we solve all this? 'Cause you get,

35:25 you sit around and hope that the utility is gonna do it for you and they don't, then we're in trouble, so. Yeah, I agree with that. So that's my thing. The other thing that Zane Ball said, the

35:36 Intel guy that was really fascinating was, he's like, man, we're in the second inning of designing data centers, he goes, man, we start throwing a lot of brain power at that. We can get super

35:49 entrepreneurial, super creative, super more energy efficient, 'cause we've really only been doing this 10 years. Imagine if we turn AI on to, how do we make these more efficient? He's like, I

36:04 think we're second, third ending of that stuff. Yeah, I had a really interesting conversation last week or the week before with Rob Stewart from Lime Instruments. And Rob's family's really storied.

36:18 They were Stewart and Stevenson, and he's super fucking smart when it comes to the engineering side of

36:27 power generation and turbines. And so he was schooling me up. And one thing that he brought up that I haven't even been thinking about in this idea of power generation not on oil and gas assets is,

36:38 you know, not only just having an ag gas turbine allow you to get cheaper electricity for all of your assets than pulling from the grid, but you get a higher quality of power as well. And he just

36:51 started diving down into how important the quality of that power is and, you know, for keeping. ESP is alive and all of these, all of these different systems. And so if you look at, you know,

37:05 the future opportunity for EMPs are mid streams. It's a start generating your own power. You don't have to sell to a peak plan anymore or to a refinery. You produce power right there. And then

37:17 with that electron, you power up your own assets, get higher quality of power You can participate in our COTS and celery program if you're in Texas, put it into the grid during peak demand or take

37:32 all those electrons. And yeah, he owes data centers. I promise it's a Bitcoin mine. Yeah, everything. The coin mine. Yeah. So that's, it's just a very interesting time. And I've actually

37:44 heard two of our, two of our more entrepreneurial private EMP companies have hired XIPP guys to come in and say, Hey, how do I address this? Yeah, anytime the private EMP-rich guys start looking

38:03 at stuff, there's probably some merit to - Your mantra is taking shape. Yeah. There we go. Get out of the producing and selling natural gas business into generating and selling electrons. Exactly.

38:18 So let's go real quick to transportation. We'll talk about trains this week and planes at automobiles next week

38:27 Former colleague and a really good friend, Ryan Zorn, who has recently joined Liberty as their Director of Energy Additions. He's been pretty heavily involved with things like their sustainability

38:40 reporting, but now he's on Chris's team. Posted an analysis in an op-ed, I call it a fact-ed because it's filled with facts as Ryan tends to do opposed to a big mess. And so the Denver Gazette

38:56 reached out to Ryan and said, Hey, would you expand this, edit it and expand it to include the Denver rail system and the analysis. Basically what it's focus is, is to essentially cost out what

39:12 the emissions avoidance of rail. So in Colorado, you now have a58 million a year ad to rental car fees, so3 per rental.

39:30 And then you've added175 million

39:33 in what he called a ransom in a new oil and gas production fee, in support of governor, police's and the Colorado administration's and politicians' vision of a rail build out

39:49 So the cost for rail Denver RTD, I'm not sure exactly what the acronym. stands for, I should look that

40:00 up, is288 per passenger mile. That's five times more than the allowable IRS deductible for your car for business use. They recently had a program called Zero Fair for Better Air on RTD.

40:15 So you ride free and avoid your own carbon emissions

40:22 And that only raised a man 10.

40:26 The equivalent price of carbon avoidance or the carbon price

40:31 would be5, 600 a ton. Now, you compare that to California's 2023 cap and trade price of30 a ton.

40:41 The original article that he wrote, because he lives in the Winter Park Fraser area, was about the ski train that Amtrak runs during the ski season. You needed a comparison for a family of four

40:55 driving versus riding the ski train. Well, it's144 premium per family to ride the ski train versus driving that includes parking, that includes

41:08 cost of fuel, which is pretty representative. And so the indifference point for gasoline to overcome this144

41:19 premium is3052 a gallon according to those calculations And the emissions mitigation costs for

41:27 that

41:30 ride versus drive is52, 000 a ton. Americans on average admit about 19 tons a year per person. So these are

41:43 less than drops in the ocean in terms of mitigation at unsustainable costs ultimately somebody's paying for it. back to Denver's rail system, I believe it's either five or 10, passenger fares only

42:00 cover five to 10 of rail Denver's operating costs. Yeah, that's consistent with the numbers I've heard about. Yeah, it's not it's not all that different. I just thought it was an interesting

42:11 highlight of, you know, cover fares only cover five to 10 of the operating costs. Yeah, like, and that's not even getting your money back from building the system That's just the operating costs.

42:24 Yeah. So the Denver Gazette piece is not buying to pay well, it's worth reading. It's a good analysis supported by a lot of fact, that's why I like to call it a fact in peace, not an op-ed piece.

42:35 Back did. That's interesting. I like riding the train from Denver Airport into downtown. So it's good utility, but yeah, you say charge like a dollar, so it makes sense it

42:50 Doesn't it doesn't make any money. Oh and back to the Amtrak ski train with kind of the peak numbers during ski season. The capacity of the train or the ridership is 1 of the total. Yeah. So it's,

43:08 you know, it's not a, it's not a large scale, scalable solution. Yeah. Cool. And if you move out coal, apparently there's some, you know, kind of economic viability of the track itself. And

43:19 so the infrastructure is supporting strictly passenger operations and there's talk of an extension to steamboat, et cetera, you put it, put more burden on taxpayers and get less utility, economic

43:34 utility out

43:41 of it. So interesting read. I'd recommend everybody take a look at that. Cool. We'll link to that. All right, gents, coming up on the end of the show, we got anything we sat, you know, I

43:45 realized, I've been doing our finger the week a long time ago. Yeah. I kind of miss figure of the week That video was fun. Loved it.

43:54 Someone really deserves a fingerable feedback.

43:57 The one thing we do need to give a shout out to is

44:02 June 6th and D-Day

44:06 launching the invasion into Norman Dita to take Europe back from the Nazis. I saw Biden's speech, I'll give Biden credit, that was a good speech he gave and just seeing the cemetery and seeing, I

44:22 mean, there were 150 veterans up there and there were ages, you know, 98, 104.

44:30 'Cause this was the 80th anniversary of it. And when I took my girls a couple of years ago to Paris, I made them go spend one day up in Normandy and I actually shot this on the podcast. I did a

44:44 Texan looks at Paris. The thing that struck me about Normandy, which was so amazing is. They were sending over three waves of ship. And the first wave or a bunch of privates, secure the beach,

44:59 the second wave is gonna bring kernels, those type folks, and then the third wave is gonna bring the generals to a T, to a letter. All the US. generals went with the first wave, including

45:15 Theodore Roosevelt Jr, the president. It was 57. 57, walk in with a cane, and somebody tried to say, Now you're on the third ship, and he hit him with the cane to get out of my fucking way.

45:28 But what happened on that first wave coming in, there was actually a lot more wind and blue,

45:35 blue, several ships to the west, including the one Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was on. And him being there, he made the call of, Hey, we start the war right here, landed, a bunch of privates would

45:51 have freaked out, not had what to do. And that was instrumental in D-Day being successful. And so it's pretty powerful stuff this weekend watching, and we should all be grateful. Yeah, I make a

46:05 habit every June 6th of watching Reagan's 1984 speech from went to the Rangers, the Ranger veterans. It certainly was the greatest presidential speech of his term, I think it's one of the greatest

46:20 of all time. And that's. Obama gave a great one too. Obama had a line of so much of the course of human events were dictated by literally a fight for a stretch of beach, two miles wide, and seven

46:36 miles long. Did you see the 97 year old paratrooper who actually made a jump? Yeah. That's a terrible jump. It was really cool. And his guide basically rolled on top of him looks up and he said,

46:50 I'm okay, I'm okay.

46:52 My great uncle, Johnny, was on the 100 first. He jumped and, you know, when I, he's no longer with us, but when I knew him, I was a younger kid, and he was a small old frill, man, just nice

47:07 as could be. And he'd tell us stories about, you know, jumping and getting lost and having to find team members and they go and

47:21 kill

47:23 a couple of Nazis and take their uniforms and go to their camp and get in the child line to get some food and then blow up a bridge on their way out. And as a kid, like, you don't appreciate those

47:34 stories now looking back on it. I'm like, dude, this guy was a bad motherfucker. He was 17 years old when he went into the military. So many of those guys sitting on the stage,

47:46 that were in their 90s were there because they lied about their age to go to war. Yeah. That's something that their children, their kids. And you know, it was just crazy 'cause you know, you sit

47:58 there like as a kid, like you're not even in a

48:02 place of consciousness to fathom what they went through. Save the planet. And he would never, like they would never put that on either, right? Like they went, I think this was what's crazy about

48:12 that generation Like there's this podcast, I don't know if I'll have time to get the link, but everyone should go listen to it. It's a podcast from Jocko. It's the only podcast I've ever listened

48:22 to in my life from Jocko and it's like two and a half hours long. And it's talking about the story of a guy from Louisiana and oh man, what's forgetting the name? But he was held prisoner of war in

48:39 the Philippines and they got put on their trail and they had a march. Oh two men trail. No, that wasn't it.

48:48 Yes, that was it. Yes. Thank you, Mark.

48:52 Anyways, I mean, just horrific. Most of the US. troops died and he survived and he went on to be a geologist and oil and gas. And it's like this dude went through the most just unimaginable pain

49:09 and torture and losses to brothers in the war and just went on to live a normal, a normal life somehow after that. But seriously like I'm not an emotional guy and every time I listen to his podcast

49:23 probably once a year just to get some, get some a dose of reality and perception and the end of it. Every single fucking time I start tearing up and it's, it's, it's that sad. But yeah, I mean,

49:40 got I went on to be a rock clicker and an oil and gas. So Veritz and did release a COBT special edition on Thursday at 630. They had Alex Kershaw, who wrote a recent book. He spent his whole life

49:56 on World War II and a heavy portion of that on D-Day's Abret has lived in the US for a number of decades, but a lot of the first wave detail that's in that discussion is pretty interesting and it's,

50:11 I think, only an hour long So

50:14 the thing that was really compelling to me was the gliders that came in to the key bridge called Pegasus Bridge. And they basically had to crash land these wooden gliders and immediately take over a

50:28 bridge. And, you know, I think they said they impacted at something over a hundred miles an hour. So there's a lot of people mangled and killed in those gliders as well, which was just,

50:43 Yeah. courage unimaginable. Yeah, it's different. I mean, you, I mean, you go today, you go out to Normandy, you go walk around, you got to go see the American cemetery. It's amazing. But

50:55 I mean, the bunkers are still there. The Germans were sitting in the park marks. Yeah. Yeah. Well, good shout out, Chuck. All right, we got to wrap this up. But quick notes, we have energy

51:09 tech night in Oklahoma City this Thursday. So if you're in OKC, come hang out with us. It's a good time. I don't know off the top of my head what startups we are presenting, but we'll be a good

51:20 show regardless. So Casey was a good time last year. So make sure to check that out. You can get tickets on digitalwalk headerscom best 50 bucks you ever spent. If free beer, pizza, good company.

51:30 So see you there and we will catch you all on next week's episode.